NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.
Burt RutanNo one knows how to make going to orbit orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.
Burt RutanAchieving something that has never existed in manned spaceflight and that is high volume and public access.
Burt RutanAt various times over 20 years, I did preliminary designs for aircraft like the Stratolaunch. For that whole time I was encouraging us to do something that almost everyone else felt you could not do.
Burt RutanVirgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough not to tell people what they are doing!
Burt RutanThe next 15 years will see thousands of people leave the atmosphere on suborbital flights. My company's SS2 system might fly 100,000 people by 2024. If it is shown to be highly profitable, perhaps we will see 20,000 people traveling to orbit by 2035, and then thousands to the moon by 2050. If we make a courageous decision, like the program we kicked off for Apollo, we will see our grandchildren in outposts on other planets.
Burt Rutan